Thug Kitchen is my Spirit Animal

I spent a whole Saturday reading through the first Thug Kitchen cookbook and then that week ahead I spent the whole week making recipes from it. They were devine recipes, language and all.

If you don’t know about Thug Kitchen, you need to peep dat shit. I’m pretty sure Thug Kitchen is my spirit animal. I hope no one thinks I’m trying to copy them by the way I write, I just, I get it.

The first thing you need to know is that they use some ris-kay language. Which is GREAT. It really makes the recipe reading hold your attention. And they call you out if they know you’re being a little bitch. I need that in my life, because I am often being a little bitch.

The cookbook had so much more than just recipes. There was a section on how to marinate and bake tofu. I’ve been doing this for years now and have never tried it the way they presented it. I am turnin’ dat oven up to 11 next time I bake some mother fuckin’ tofu.

They give a nice list of must-haves for the kitchen to get your started, from kitchen utensils to kitchen cabinet essentials. I felt pretty good to know that I already had all of these things. Hell yeah, just a modern day cooking artist right here. Note: Melon Baller was NOT on the list. Fuck that thing.

The most helpful section to me was about learning how to substitute ingredients in a recipe. If you don’t have this, just use this. BUT don’t try to substitute a green pepper for an onion because that shit just isn’t the same. And what did I do during my week of trying Thug Kitchen recipes? For every recipe I tried, I forgot an ingredient or 2 and tried to substitute. Some were successful, some were not. I could hear them cursing at me in my head each time I fucked up the dish. More on that later.

I guess what you really need to know is that Thug Kitchen is a vegan cookbook. Though I feel like if I never told you that, you wouldn’t have been able to guess it. The recipes are so rich in flavor and full of ingredients that you don’t even notice the meat is missing. Even the cheese. We made tacos without cheese and it was still baller. The healthy ingredients are off the chart, your heart will be feelin’ extra strong after a week of Thug Kitchen.

I went through the whole book and didn’t write any of my favorites down. I was like shit, I have to go back through this book again to find dinners for this week? Luckily, our trusty friend Aaron was here to handle this for me. He flipped to random pages and those were the dinners for the week – easy peasy! Unless you’re Aaron, it probably wasn’t so easy for him. I say this because I am a difficult person.

Here is an example:
He flips to tofu tacos. While this excites me, I am also immediately against it because it combines tofu and tacos which means that we cannot have a taco dish or a tofu dish again during the week. He is flabbergasted. He explains to me that there are very different types of tacos in this book, I could have tacos all week long if I wanted to. Same with tofu, there are many different flavor profiles that tofu can have, so why not have it more than once a week? He goes on to say how tofu is a bean, just like black beans, which is also something I only like to have once a week. Well, folks, we had a week of different types of beans thanks to Aaron convincing me that I am ridiculous.

The grocery list was long AF. I asked if I had to get real broccoli as apposed to the frozen broccoli I already had. Aaron insisted I do so. I told him this was too much fresh produce! He said “it’s one section of the grocery store!” Ok fine, you win. What happens when we get to the store? Joe is like, “why do we need all this produce?” BECAUSE AARON SAID SO THAT’S WHY.

It was fun cooking with things I have never cooked with before though. Aaron got a picture of our dinner every night that week only to be upset he wasn’t there to eat it with us.

Hold on to your butts, this is going to be a wild week of vegan cooking. Stay tuned to hear how I fucked these recipes up.